Auschwitz is a type of beer, a festival or bread, say children

Published on Sunday 8 March 2009 20:47

SOME schoolchildren believe Auschwitz is the name of a type of beer or a religious festival, rather than the Nazi extermination camp, research published today reveals.

About 1.3 million people perished in the death camp during the Second World War, but a survey of more than 1,000 pupils aged 11-16 in secondary school revealed that a quarter still did not know its purpose.

About 10 per cent were not sure what it was, 8 per cent thought it was a country bordering Germany, 2 per cent thought it was a beer, the same proportion said it was a religious festival and a further 1 per cent said it was a type of bread.

Miramax and the London Jewish Cultural Centre, which commissioned the survey, said that, as there are about 4.5 million children aged 11 to 16 in the UK, the equivalent of 90,000 youngsters wrongly identified Auschwitz as a drink and 45,000 mistook it for bread.

The poll found that six in ten youngsters did not know what the Final Solution was, with a fifth claiming it was the peace talks held to end the war.

And it revealed that, despite the Holocaust being specified on the secondary National Curriculum in England as a subject pupils must be taught, only 37 per cent knew the Holocaust claimed the lives of six million Jews, with many drastically underestimating the death toll.

While 97 per cent of those questioned could identify Adolf Hitler from a photograph, those who could not mistook famous figures, such as Winston Churchill, Salvador Dali and Albert Einstein, for the dictator.